The Wandering Jew of Anti-Fascism: A Selection from Taras Grescoe’s Possess the Air (2020)
“In lighter moments, Gaetano Salvemini referred to himself as the ‘wandering Jew of anti-Fascism.’ In reality, escaping Fascist Italy had been a matter of life or death for Salvemini. Born one of nine children to a poor family in Apulia, on the heel of the Italian peninsula, he was intelligent and dedicated enough to win a scholarship to study at a college in Tuscany. After being starved of reading for five years in a southern Italian high school, Salvemini found Florence an awakening. He became an enthusiastic Marxist, and made friends with Carlo and Nello Rosselli—the learned Jewish brothers who would soon join the community of anti-Fascists in exile—as well as Bernard Berenson, becoming a frequent guest at the American expatriate’s art-filled villa in the city’s foothills.
Salvemini’s life, and philosophical outlook, was changed forever by one of the twentieth century’s most dramatic natural disasters. After finishing college in Tuscany, he’d moved to Sicily to teach school. In 1908, the island was struck by a 7.1-magnitude earthquake, followed by a tidal wave, which killed more than one hundred thousand people and wiped out the city of Messina. Salvemini was thrown from a window, and watched from beneath the architrave that broke his fall as his wife, sister, and five young children vanished in a cloud of plaster. After days of groping through the rubble, he found all but the bodies of his wife and his youngest son.
‘I am a miserable wretch,’ he wrote to Carlo Rosselli, ‘who has seen the happiness of eleven years destroyed in two minutes.’
After the Messina earthquake, Salvemini acted with the courage of someone with nothing left to lose. He returned to the University of Florence, where he brought an intensely pragmatic approach to the study of history, coupled with an Enlightenment-born reverence for science and a heroically Socratic duty to the truth. He was a severe critic of the philosopher Benedetto Croce and the elderly prime minister Giovanni Giolitti, both of whom he thought addicted to what he saw as the distinctly Italian vices of idealism and empty rhetoric. He became the elder statesman to an influential magazine, La Voce, started by Prezzolini, whose early contributors included both Mussolini and his Liberal foe Giovanni Amendola. His political convictions brought him to Rome in 1919, where after being elected as an independent deputy, he stood up in the Chamber and accused Mussolini of embezzling half a million lire collected from the United States to fund Gabriele d’Annunzio’s adventure in Fiume. The embattled Mussolini challenged Salvemini to a duel. It was only called off when the injured party’s seconds refused to investigate the truth of the accusations.
Salvemini had picked the wrong enemy. Il Duce’s rise to power made the historian a marked man. In 1923, Mussolini refused to grant him a passport to lecture at King’s College in London. Salvemini went anyway, securing papers from the Italian consul in Paris that got him across the Channel. He returned to Tuscany—at a time the region was home to one in four of all Italy’s Fascists—where thugs with truncheons awaited him in his lecture hall. His reputation for bravery made him the leader of Florence’s anti-Fascist resistance, and he helped the Rosselli brothers publish the newsletter Non Mollare (‘Don’t Give Up’), providing them with damning documents on Matteotti’s murder. After being arrested and imprisoned in Rome, Salvemini was brought to trial in Florence. The judge, anticipating international condemnation if the historian were imprisoned, granted him provisional liberty, as long as he was accompanied at all times by two ‘bodyguards.’ Salvemini, seeing the writing on the wall, decided to join the growing ranks of the fuorusciti. (Berenson—who also wore a pointed beard—apparently laughed off a suggestion that Salvemini borrow his passport to cross the border.) Zigzagging across northern Italy in a series of trains, Salvemini threw off his guards and reached the south of France in the summer of 1925.
He quickly established a reputation as the voice of conscience of the anti-Fascist exile communities in Paris and London. Salvemini hated the Socialists and Communists, referring to himself as a “democrat of the antediluvian school.” His life was constantly in peril. The regime’s newspapers had proclaimed a vendetta against the disloyal professor. ‘Go ahead, you Fascists who love the Duce with passion and dedication! Cross the frontiers,’ one urged its readers, ‘go ahead, Fascists, and kill.’ . . .
Salvemini, through his incessant lecturing, and the publication of such works as 1927’s The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, became an incisive analyst of the causes of the Fascist malaise, and so a thorn in the side of Fascists in Italy and abroad. . . .
Fascism, for Salvemini, was a malady of sick or failed democracies, whose people consented to abandoning hard-won liberties in return for the promise of national unity, purity, and strength. As Salvemini saw it, Mussolini had discovered a winning formula, one that future would-be autocrats would adopt freely. The modern strongman triumphed by promising to make the nation great again.”—Taras Grescoe, Possess the Air: Love, Heroism, and the Battle for the Soul of Mussolini’s Rome (2020)
